PolyAI
PolyAI builds enterprise voice assistants that can understand customers and solve their problems, regardless of what they say, or how they say it.
One of the fundamental building blocks of conversational AI is understanding natural language. Enterprises are increasingly using AI to interact with their customers, but the existing systems are clunky and forced. AI agents need to understand what a user says in order to react accordingly, and provide an amazing customer experience.
PolyAI has developed a proprietary suite of technologies that enable human-sounding voice assistants to understand callers whatever they say and however they speak, regardless of their accent or of any background noise. Their voice assistants can carry on a conversation for as long as it takes to solve a customer’s query, and callers are free to deviate from standard customer journeys and change their minds half-way through the conversation.
Founders
Nikola Mrkšić
CEO
Nikola graduated from the University of Cambridge with a PhD in Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing. He was named in the Forbes 30 under 30 in 2021 for his work with PolyAI.
Tsung-Hsien (Shawn) Wen
CTO
Shawn holds a PhD from the Dialogue Systems group, University of Cambridge. His research focuses on language generation and end-to-end dialogue modelling, specifically in learning to generate responses for task-oriented dialogue systems. He received best paper awards at EMNLP 2015 and SigDial 2015.
Pei-Hao (Eddy) Su
Cofounder
Eddy obtained his PhD under the supervision of Professor Steve Young at Cambridge University. His research focuses on deep reinforcement learning for spoken dialogue systems, which won the ACL 2016 best student paper award.
Milestones
Founded at Entrepreneur First
Seed ($2.4 million) led by Amadeus Capital Partners & Passion Capital
Series A ($12 million) led by Point72 Ventures
Series B ($40 million) led by Georgian